16 June 2011

The University of Wisconsin Madison is beautiful all year but my favorite season to be on campus is summertime. Participants during our 2011 course "IMPROVING THE HYDROGEOLOGIC ANALYSIS OF FRACTURED BEDROCK SYSTEMS" indicated they enjoyed it too along with the on-campus fun. Anyone who is familiar with the campus understands the uniqueness of State Street that connects the University and State Capitol. We were aware of the daily (history-making) protests happening at the Capitol during our evening walks after class on State Street - which made our experience uniquely memorable.

The 3-day course takes advantage of the excellent facilities in Madison ranging from the state-of-the-art on-campus classroom auditorium, the extensive rock core library in Mt. Horeb and access to bedrock exposures and the fantastic field site with a variety of wells and downhole technologies. The exercises range from practicing our rock core logging skills to FLUTe sampling to using the a host of dynamic borehole flow meters. The 20-sec video below shows the rock core logging exercises:

Participants travel globally for this course with some travelling this year as far as the Western Cape of South Africa. We are honored to have the privilege of bringing our educational experiences to people. We enjoy meeting participants with such a wide variety of experiences, backgrounds and originating from such diverse geographic distributions. Thank you to those who joined us in Madison for this fun and unique course!!

The Solid H(o) Slug™ is a traditional solid slug that is designed to yield a pre-estimated initial displacement during a slug test.

It's a new item available only through Midwest GeoSciences Group. The H(o) Slug may ordered in either teflon or PVC.

Calculated initial displacement is represented by "H(o)*" where H is the calculated distance of instanteous change at time zero (o) in water level created by the the slug. "H(o)" is the measured initial displacement. It is important to compare calculated H(o)* with measured H(o) as part of the QA/QC of the slug test for checking the reliability of test data.

The 60-sec video below shows initial displacement occurring within a two-inch diamter well using the H(o) Slug for a one-foot initial displacement. Note how the water level changes by 1 foot after dropping the slug mimicing the initial displacement during a falling head slug test.

The H(o) Slug is available now at http://www.midwestgeo.com/ for both english and metric units:
12 in, 18 in and 24 in --or-- 30cm, 45cm, 60cm.